For players, coaches, writers, and fans, basketball is a science and an art, a religious sacrament, a source of entertainment, and a way of interacting with the world. In Lost in the Game Thomas Beller entwines these threads with his lifetime's experience as a player and journalist, roaming NBA locker rooms and city parks as a basketball flaneur in search of the meaning of the modern game. He captures the magnificence and mastery of today’s most accomplished NBA players while paying homage to the devotion of countless congregants in the global church of pickup basketball. He shares his own stories from the courts, meditating on basketball’s role in city life and its impact on the athlete’s psyche as he moves from youth to middle age. Part journalistic account, part memoir of a slightly talented player whose main gift is being tall, Lost in the Game charts the game’s inexorable gravitational hold on those who love it.

Thomas Beller is Associate Professor of English at Tulane University, a regular contributor to the New Yorker, and the author of J. D. Salinger: The Escape Artist, How to Be a Man, Seduction Theory, and other books.
 

Acronyms  xiii
Acknowledgments  xv
Introduction  xvii
The Court on Horatio Street  1
Spree   10
Damian Lillard's Game-Winning Shot  16
The City Game  19
James Harden's Transcendent Step-Back  30
Homicide at the Playground  36
Coach  43
Anthony Davis and the Plight of the Modern NBA Big Man  62
The Maserati Kid  69
The NBA Kaleidoscope  71
Most Definitely  77
The All-Star Game Diaries  82
The Two-Thousand-Dollar Popsicle  89
Here We Go Again: On the 2018 Cavaliers-Warriors NBA Finals  95
Loitering Backstage at the NBA  101
The Earth Is Round and Kyrie Irving  110
The Nets  115
Lost in the Game  119
The Pleasures of the Old Man Game  132
The Warriors' Torrential Victory  137
French Math at the NBA Draft  142
Zion‘s Burst  147
Pandemic Playgrounds  154
The Jokić Files  168
Bol Bol on an Escalator  188
Outscoring My Father  200